ABSTRACT
Self-reflection and reflection about others have implications for people’s interpretations of the social environment, and are fundamental to understanding each person as an idiosyncratic, social, and psychological organism. Although social psychology has tracked important processes concerning general principles of social thought, feelings, and behavior, it has not focused on individual private experience. Moreover, while personality psychology has helped elucidate nomothetic individual differences, as well as the structure of personality in taxonomic terms, it has also tended to neglect the study of individual experience. There have been infrequent attempts to integrate extant literatures into a coherent body of knowledge, and to identify and examine fruitful areas of empirical investigation concerning subjective experience. Singer, however, has contributed to the fields of clinical, personality, and even social psychology by having the courage and tenacity to choose as his life’s work the problems of consciousness and private experience. He has substantially increased knowledge about essential questions that have been considered intractable. With an appreciation for theory and research, he has focused on the ways people consciously construct knowledge about the self and others, and on how such knowledge structures influence the sense made of the social environment. Literatures in these areas owe a debt to Singer’s work.
